1. Technical Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to devices that include a hard disk drive (HDD); and, more particularly, it relates to management of the various functions that are performed within such devices that include a HDD.
2. Description of Related Art
As is known, many varieties of memory storage devices (e.g., disk drives/HDDs), such as magnetic disk drives are used to provide data storage for a host device, either directly, or through a network such as a storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS). Typical host devices include stand alone computer systems such as a desktop or laptop computer, enterprise storage devices such as servers, storage arrays such as a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) arrays, storage routers, storage switches and storage directors, and other consumer devices such as video game systems and digital video recorders. These devices provide high storage capacity in a cost effective manner.
When designing devices that include a HDD, there are many considerations to make and oftentimes many cost/benefit/trade-offs that are made to arrive at a final solution. The prior art approaches to making and designing such systems that may include an HDD are typically performed in an ad hoc way, in that, a designer generally considers the overall design and attempts to come up with (ideally) a best overall design. These systems oftentimes include some form of error correction code (ECC) decoding functionality as well, and the design of such ECC decoding functionality can oftentimes be one of the more challenging portions of overall design. In the prior art, there is no general means by which the design of such ECC decoding architectures can be made, including those implemented within devices and systems that include one or more HDDs.